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The LA Phil has a vastly improved website.... Soho the Dog is selling Strauss and Mahler T-shirts (profits go to a worthy cause).... NYC classical station WQXR is collecting votes for its annual Classical Countdown, held at the end of December. Wouldn't it be great to have some post-Tchaikovsky music pop up in the most popular category? I suggest a twentieth-century classic on the order of The Rite of Spring or the Quartet for the End of Time.... On December 5, Bob Shingleton's Future Radio broadcasts all four hours of Alvin Curran's marvelous Inner Cities piano cycle. In college, I put Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum on the air, then spent the afternoon working on my senior thesis, needing only to change the CDs once an hour.... Song of the day: Brooklyn band Barbez plays a wonderfully spooky arrangement of "The Portrait" from Schnittke's ballet Esquisses.

Tomorrow Deutsche Grammophon will launch an online Web Shop containing high-quality MP3s of 2400 albums in its catalogue, including six hundred out-of-print items. The bit rate is 320 kb/second, much higher than the standard 128 kb/s. I was given a quick preview of the site and was impressed by what I saw. Modern masters such as Ligeti, Nono, and Reich are well represented, as
far as DG's catalogue allows, alongside the canonical greats. Test case: Stele. On the occasion of the Berlin Philharmonic's recent performance, a number of us wrote ecstatically of György Kurtág's orchestral masterwork, which has recently been available only on an import-only Claudio Abbado CD costing upwards of forty dollars. [Update: It's also on a Haenssler Classic Mahler set, Christopher Culver notes.] Now you can obtain the piece for $3.87 ($1.29 per movement). The design is smooth and the operation quick; I bought, downloaded, and was listening to a new Stele in under three minutes. These are definitely hefty files; the 12-minute work takes up 31 MB. But the quality is superb. I was actually kind of shocked to hear such rich sounds coming out of my iPod. Times are changing....

AC Douglas highlights the odd final paragraph of a Tech Crunch story about DG's site: "It may be worth noting that classical music receives less legal protection than contemporary music because only its recorded performances, not its compositions, are still under copyright." The writer seems to forget about the existence of twentieth- and twenty-first-century classical music. Hey, there's a hot new book on the subject!

Update 11/28: After some opening-day glitches, the Web Shop seems to be running well. As another test case, I bought Myung Whun-Chung's Des Canyons aux étoiles, which sounds lovely. I should mention that each download includes a pdf version of the liner notes.

Some readers may be relieved to know that I am embarking on the final leg of my book tour. This Tuesday I'll spread the holiday cheer by speaking on music under totalitarianism at the Met Museum; on Friday I will give my audiovisual 20th-century lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art; on Dec. 3 I will speak at the Hilbert Circle Theatre in Indianapolis; on Dec. 4 I will appear at An Die Musik in Baltimore, as part of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series; and, finally, on Dec. 5 I'll read at my favorite local bookstore, 192 Books.

The American tour of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela occasioned fascinating and occasionally intense debate on the Internet. Some were troubled by the sight of the young musicians donning Venezuelan national colors at a time when other students were protesting against Hugo Chávez's efforts to end presidential term limits and otherwise expand his powers. Bob Shingleton of On an Overgrown Path has been particularly outspoken, accusing musicians and administrators of complicity in authoritarian politics; here's a selection of his posts on the topic. Matthew Guerrieri mounted a vigorous and intelligent defense. What disturbs me, as I say in my New Yorker column, is that when politicians throw money at music, some in the classical business tend not to scrutinize the politics too closely. The twentieth century is richly stocked with cases in point. I have heard it said that the future of classical music is in Venezuela; I have also heard it said that the future of classical music lies in China. I, for one, am pretty content with classical music here in America, not least because it makes do largely without "official" support. (A story to watch: Mike Huckabee's dark-horse candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. As I noted last year, Huckabee is a determined supporter of music and arts education.) I'll throw a quotation from the maverick Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer into the continuing debate: "Art within the constraints of a system is political action in favor of that system, regardless of content."

Critic/author Jody Rosen drew my attention to a Zogby/Lear Center survey of political beliefs and entertainment preferences among 3939 American adults. Down at the bottom you find this surprising result: "Although moderates are less enamored with it,
classical music barely nudged ahead of rock as the most popular music
genre overall." Almost 62% of respondents said they listen to it. In fact, the basic value of classical music seems to be one of the few things that people of all political stripes agree on. You wouldn't know this from watching the major TV networks or reading magazines such as Time and Newsweek. The question, of course, is what people mean by "listening." Do they go to concerts? Do they buy CDs? Put your money where your mouth is, America!

It's past two in the morning at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, and the Vexations marathon is going strong. The previous player seemed to be getting a little punchy toward the end of his run, but this one — I believe it's Paul Kilbey, president of the Music Society — exudes an eerie calm.

The scene around 5AM.

Early afternoon: a pale sun has risen over Cambridge, and Satie soldiers on. This appears to be Jamal Sutton. I, admittedly, slept.

2:28PM: Kilbey acknowledges the grateful applause of an invisible but not infinitesimal public. Alas, my connection went down during iteration #840, so I cannot comment on the interpretive choices that Kilbey made at the very end, but he had been tending toward a hard-edged neoclassical aesthetic. Congratulations to all!

Maulina delivers her annual Thanksgiving Day broadcast from a fur-lined igloo by George.

Beginning today at 7PM GMT, an intrepid team of pianists from the Sidney Sussex College Music Society at Cambridge University will play all 840 iterations of Satie's Vexations. There's live streaming audio of the event. Paul Kilbey, who organized the event, told me that he was inspired by my various posts on the Vexations topic. I'm honored! Overgrown Path has more.... Boston-based pianist and professor Michael Monroe, whose blog MMusing is new to me, proposes a delightful selection of classical vanity plates. My favorites: 81A BYE, FAUN PM.... Pandora now features classical music.... Matthew Guerrieri has turned on his Secret Crazy Music News Feed and discovered that Linda Kern Cummings, an angry heir of Jerome Kern, is fighting in the courts to win back some of the long-deceased composer's royalties. The killer detail is that Cummings is suing, among others, the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, which has evidently been receiving some of the royalties by way of charitable bequest. Way to go!... More Radiohead in Chicago: on Dec. 2 the dal niente ensemble plays arrangements of "Dollars and Cents" and "Nude" along with works of Lee Hyla, Christian Lauba, David Reminick, and Christopher Fisher-Lochhead.

A curious detail in Julie Kavanagh's biography of Rudolf Nureyev: she relates how Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, attempted to befriend the ballet superstar, whom he is said to have "hugely admired — possibly even desired." One night in Cannes, Jagger invited Nureyev to attend a recital by none other than Sviatoslav Richter. Nureyev had no interest in pop music and did not find Jagger interesting.

David Brooks, a vaguely conservative op-ed columnist for The New York Times, recently took an ill-advised detour into music criticism, lamenting that "there are now dozens of niche musical genres where there used to be this thing called rock." Roger Evans sent me the link, commenting that it sounded like an absurdist parody of classical-music lovers complaining that kids no longer gather round the radio to listen to Beethoven. He goes on: "Brooks writes as though it's normal for a few artists and groups to dominate a whole culture and thus to know rewards beyond the dreams of avarice. Couldn't the 'fragmentation' he laments mean that the highly commercial repertories he's discussing may be beginning to experience the dynamic already familiar to other streams of music — folk, non-Western, classical, etc. — joining them in a larger, broader musical culture? Are we obliged to see the democratizing power of new media as a bad thing if it puts down the mighty from their thrones and enables a whole lot of others?" The answers to those questions are, of course, absolutely yes and absolutely not.

A bow of the head in honor of Craig Smith, the perennially inspired artistic director of Emmanuel Music in Boston, who died on Nov. 14, at the age of sixty. Among his many achievements are the complete cycle of Bach cantatas in the 1970s; his collaboration with Peter Sellars on the legendary Mozart/Da Ponte cycle; his collaboration with Mark Morris on L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato; and his sublime Bach cantata recording with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Here is Jeremy Eichler's obituary; Matthew Guerrieri says more.

I'm reading Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music, a collection of lecture/essays from the Experience Music Project's annual Pop Conference in Seattle. It's the second such volume that Eric Weisbard, longtime organizer of the conference, has edited. I looked at Jason King's essay "The Sound of Velvet Melting: The Power of 'Vibe' in the Music of Roberta Flack," and was very struck by the following passage, which reminded me of the stories of Will Marion Cook and of other would-be African-American classical composers whom I mention in the fourth chapter of my book:

Like Nina Simone before her, Flack straddled an interest in classical music and gospel. Flack spent her Arlington, Virginia, youth in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church where she "grew up playing piano for the choir — Handel, Bach, Verdi, Mozart, and all those great, wonderful, intricately written Negro spirituals." She would then sneak into the Baptist church down the street to get her fix of 'the raunchy, wide-open, free, spontaneous, full-of-life thing" performed by gospel luminaries like Sam Cooke, Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, the Five Blind Boys, and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. She won a statewide, segregated classical piano competition at thirteen; preternaturally gifted, she enrolled in Howard University on a full music scholarship at the unusually young age of fifteen. After earning a master's in music education, Flack began her career teaching math and English in a small high school in Farmville, North Carolina, before returning to DC to teach in public schools. She earned money on the side accompanying opera singers at the Tivoli Club, where she discovered her ability to draw audiences with her singing voice.

Like Miles Davis, whose cool minimalism was rooted in his European classical training to lyrically hold notes as well as his own recognition of his limited technical virtuosity, Flack's restrained, economical style stems from her fusion of classical and gospel techniques. Her distinctively spare arrangements, predilection for spaciousness, and cool reflective tone are the result of her favorite composers like Liszt and Bach. For instance, her minimalist piano accompaniment to Donny Hathaway's devastating 1972 reading of "For All We Know," which appears on Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, alters the harmonic structure of the jazz standard and is clearly inspired by classical counterpoint.

Yet that minimalist approach also seems to be a personal sensibility as much as it is a result of formal training. In a 1977 radio interview, Flack is asked to explain what she learned from classical training. She responds that she likes to "stay involved in the structure of music" in a "scientific and soulful way." When asked about the softness of her music, she claims that she likes to represent that kind of "atmosphere, down into the basement, turn on soft lights." She goes on: "everybody has that thing in them, that little quiet space. And I think fortunately that is probably my forte when it comes to performing popular music and that it's a blessing because there's a need for people to be able to play music that addresses itself to that little space too...."

King notes that Flack paid a price for the "classical" sensitivity of her singing and songs: pop critics dismissed her as too "cold," too "detached," too "soft," and, alas, too "white." King's essay amounts to an important revisionist history of her music; it's very much worth reading. As is the whole book.

A reminder that WNYC will broadcast and webcast tonight's Berlin Philharmonic concert, with Thomas Adès's Tevot and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. The concert will later be available for listening in NPR's classical archive. For much more about Carnegie's Berlin in Lights events, read the New York TimesArtsBeat blog.

Jeremy Eichler has written a beautiful portrait of György Kurtág for the Boston Globe. Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic present Kurtág's masterwork Stele at Carnegie Hall this Friday and at Boston's Symphony Hall next Monday. Rattle calls the work "a gravestone on which the entire history of European music is written."